The document which will guide the development of the 30-acre first phase of Liverpool’s Knowledge Quarter is set to go out for public consultation next month, if a draft is approved by the city council this Friday.

The site at the top of Brownlow Hill is made up of three zones: Paddington Central, the former Archbishop Blanch school and surrounding smaller sites; Paddington South between Oxford Street and Smithdown Lane, currently occupied by the Merseyside Police Vehicle Repair Centre; and Paddington North, taken up Local Solutions and Sacred Heart Primary School. The council described the latter of these three zones as “a longer term aspiration”.

The redevelopment of the Paddington Central plots will form the first phase of Paddington Village. The initial detailed masterplan divides Paddington Central into 10 sites to accommodate up to 1m sq ft of projects for the health, education and science sectors. The site has a disused rail tunnel and the main City Line running beneath it, and the plan includes a proposal for to reopen the tunnel to connect to the Northern Wirral and City Line rail lines. A new station is earmarked for the corner of Crown Street and Myrtle Street.

Occupiers already secured for Paddington Central are the Royal College of Physicians for a Northern Centre of Excellence, and the Liverpool International College, announced last week.

According to a report to the cabinet, which is due to meet on Friday 28 October, the council has acquired all of properties within Paddington Central with the exception of a student accommodation block on Elm Grove. The council said it intends to use compulsory purchase powers to complete the land assembly.

The police station is due to relocate to Edge Lane, taking over a site being vacated by Old Swan’s fruit and veg market when it moves to Stonebridge Business Park.

If the framework is approved, the document will go out to public consultation for four weeks in November.

The regeneration framework was put together by Faithful + Gould, appointed to advise on early stage Knowledge Quarter plans in 2012.

The launch of the regeneration framework will also see Liverpool City Council begin the procurement of a design and build partner for the site infrastructure and public realm “to address some of the key infrastructure challenges and promote market-ready development plots”.

Crown Street and Myrtle would be the Wapping tunnel, right under my building!! That was the original plan put forward in MALTS, however, the main financial justification for it was getting to St Helens from Central, using the wapping tunnel means crossing the mainline to London, so they came up with an alternate, that used part of both. Not sure what the article means when it say’s use 2 disused tunnels, the plan only mentions one.http://peterirate.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-new-edge-hill.html